Onward Bulletin 02/02/2021
The latest research, events and news straight to your inbox every Tuesday.
Hello and welcome to Onward’s weekly summary of research, events and opinion. We hope you enjoy it. If you do, tell your friends or donate to support our work.
Onward activity
WE ARE HIRING: Onward is looking for an Events and Fundraising Assistant and a Policy Researcher to join our growing team. Please do share with anyone you think might be interested, click here to find out more.
TOMORROW: Tackling climate change as we recover from Covid. This brilliant panel features high profile voices from across the climate change debate. Register here.
AND ON THURSDAY we are hosting a private roundtable on the future of UK Hospitality with Paul Scully MP, Minister for Small Business, Consumers and Labour Markets. To find out more about our corporate events programme, please email katie.fairclough@ukonward.com.
ONE WEEK LEFT: We are undertaking a Call for Evidence to give stakeholders the opportunity to contribute to the next report in our Getting to Zero programme. The submission deadline is the 8th February. Please do get involved if you are interested, more details here.
ELSEWHERE: Yesterday, a piece by Onward Researcher Francesca Fraser featured in DevoIntelligence, discussing our recent report Levelling up the tax system with an eye to the upcoming Budget. Chris Wood, Assistant Director of Research, Policy and Public Affairs at Shelter also discussed our report The Policies of Belonging in a piece for Inside Housing.
Conservative governments have historically been sceptical of Industrial Strategy. Synonymous with British Leyland, Conservative MPs have previously been deeply cautious about state invention. But the development, manufacture and rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine across the UK should give market purists serious pause for thought. Academia, industry and government working together towards a common goal meant that we are able to vaccinate 1.2% of the adult population of the UK in a single day.
Few people would have predicted in 2017 that the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult would be aiding the fight against a global pandemic less than a decade after its inception. Together with the accelerated launch of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, originally announced in the Industrial Strategy, this facility provides a huge boost to the herculean response to the pandemic.
This is a far cry from the laissez-faire economic policy that Conservatives are most comfortable with. It will no doubt in time become a gold standard case study for successful industrial strategy. The UK Government identified genomic sequencing and cell therapies as an area of comparative advantage, then invested in new institutional capacity and R&D funding to build out the industry. Then, when last March hit, the UK had a network of public private partnerships that could be scaled quickly.
The Government made a bet that paid off. Not all industrial strategy does and we should be wary of picking winners. But the vaccine story is instructive, especially in an era of growing national economic competition and greater demands for domestic capacity. As the Republican Governor of Ohio said last week when he launched the Cleveland Innovation District, which aims to make Ohio the foremost region for medical innovation, “This is telling the world, ‘This is the place to come’”. There are other examples where the UK has valuable knowledge capital than can be built upon, not least in industries associated with reaching net zero where demand is highly likely to increase in the coming years. The lesson from coronavirus is that industrial strategy are not dirty words.
Policy bites
OVER THE WEEKEND the Government introduced new rules ensuring new developments meet local standards of beauty, quality and design. Special mention goes to our friends at Create Streets for their brilliant work on this. Link.
Also announced was a new Taskforce for Innovation and Growth through Regulatory Reform, to be led by Sir Iain Duncan-Smith. Link.
Quick links
The Union is not a lost cause. Fraser Nelson calls for stronger voices on the case for the Union. Link.
Year 2 pupils are, on average, 7 months behind where they should by in reading and mathematics. The Education Endowment Foundation gives an insight into the effect of school closures on early learning. Link.
A nuanced look at sectoral productivity. The Bennett Institute argues to understand the UK’s low productivity you need to go further than national productivity indicators. Link.
Thank you for reading
Thank you for taking the time to read this far.
If you liked the newsletter, please feel free to share with a friend or colleague.
Every other Friday, we also send out a Levelling Up Newsletter with pieces from MPs on the Levelling Up Taskforce. Sign up here.
If you found this in Spam, please drag it into your main inbox to train the algorithm.
If you like Onward’s work, consider donating for as little as £2 a month.